"To keep the certified librarians, library hours were reduced in the school libraries and the public library, staff hours were cut and the book budgets were cut..." - Budget cuts slam school librarians in South of Boston.com, via LISNews.The TeleRead take: So if the voters and politicians are going to be miserly, maybe e-books can help at least somewhat through their greater efficiencies.The Valenti connection: Remember all the billions that Valenti-esque copyright laws will add to school and library budgets over time. Nice going, Hollywood Jack. With liberals like MPAA's, who needs conservatives?...

In the The Willful Blindness of Jack Valenti in Copyfight, Ernest Miller analyzes a recent Valenti interview by J.D. Lasica and serves up delicious examples suggesting that Mr. MPAA:--Is "Unclear on How Cryptography Works."--"Has Never Heard of 17 USC 107."--"Doesn't Realize that the MPAA Opposed TiVo to Go."--"Thinks Digital Things Last Forever"OK, so maybe Mr. MPAA could actually be more of a spin artist than a total idiot, but the Miller and Lasica items are still fun reads.Related: Richard Stallman, you light-hearted optimist you!, Branko Collin's item on the relationship between copyright and freedom of speech. He doesn't mention...

Time's slowly running out for Sony--creator of the DRM-hobbled Librie, the E-Ink-based tablet released in a test version in Japan. So far, I've heard no news of a possible U.S. Librie, hopefully with less Big Bro inside. Meanwhile Mobileread.com carries this report:...Juicebox shows us how cool an E-Ink device can be if not manufactured by Sony. It is small (50x56x3.7mm), has a multimedia card interface, includes a MP3 decoder, and of course features the wonderful E-Ink panel. The great thing about this project is that it gives the schematic and source code (alas excluding the confidential sources for the...

Why haven't we heard more about AudioBooksForFree.com, based in Scotland? You can download free MP3 audios of dozens of classics ranging from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea to Enchanted Typewriter (a machine described in a summary as being able to "communicate with Hell"). I can't wait to see if in some way I can make this work with my Dell Axim PDA. For further details on the service, see the FAQ. At least to this sighted person, the UK site appears to be blind-friendly, with a text-only mode for screen readers. Perhaps David Faucheux can add his thoughts.How long...

I've done more and more links to Wikipedia--and I'll continue to do so, despite criticism of this open-content gem.Wikipedia is no substitute for demon research, but is a superb way to get a quick overview of a topic. As a blogger linking in, I can devote more space to my main points and less space to the basics. Granted, Wikipedia could use more input from librarians, and fixed-in-time versions could aid citing and otherwise help; it is not infallible. Still, neither are commercial sources, many of which undergo less review than the wiki-based encyclopedia and are less up to...

"An international treaty to give broadcasters the right to control who may record, transmit, or distribute their signals is reaching a crucial stage of negotiation by the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. The current draft (PDF) incorporates many proposals, but the main ones most countries agree on give broadcasters 50 years' worth of legal control over the recording, retransmission, and reproduction of their broadcast signals. These rights are separate from those of the owners of the actual content being broadcast." - Wired.The TeleRead take: Oh, great. This is just what we need for the public domain and fair...

In Distrusted systems in the Inquirer, writer Wendy M. Grossman tells why the Europeans are so rational in their fear of the acquisition of ContentGuard by Microsoft and Time Warner."It's not just another case of 'Oh, let's Get Microsoft,'" she writes. "What few outside of the digital rights management arena have realized yet is that ContentGuard holds very significant patents that could have a very broad impact if the use of digital rights management takes off."ContentGuard's patents, she says, are "impressive. They cover using markup languages to attach machine-readable rights to content; they cover incorporating charging mechanisms. In fact,...

I don't agree entirely with comments below--since e-book sales are a disaster compared to what they should be. Still, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow is right on the money about DRM as a sales-killer. - David Rothman.CNet reports that ebook sales topped 3 million last year, and that publishers are slowly coming around to rejecting DRM. The best part is that famous writers like JK Rowling are rejecting ebooks, a courtesy that leaves the field open for struggling midlist writers (ahem).Bad experiences with heavy-handed DRM have soured many potential customers on e-books, said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager...

Don't think that cell phones will be important to e-books? Just take a look at the latest from PalmOne. A forthcoming Treo, apparently called the Ace/650, has 320X320 res instead of the mediocre 160x160 on the 600.While it's hardly a perfect e-book machine--I much prefer 320X480--it's a step in the right direction. Would be fun to try the new Trep with Mobipocket.The "great news, according to Mike Cane, is the mix of high-res, bluetooth, a new keyboard backlighting system, a built-in video recorder and the 1.3-megapixel camera.And the "bad"? "Total incompatibility with all accessories" except for the universal headset....

Why is it that so many citations in scholarly articles are mangled? And couldn't a unified linking system in the TeleRead vein help? From Peter Jacso's Linking on Steroids in Information Today:Sadly, a significant proportion of the cited references have typos in their titles and/or page numbers as well as in the names of authors, journals, volumes, and issues. Abstracting-and-indexing services add their own typos and inconsistencies (and sometimes correct the erroneous ones in the source, as H.W. Wilson does so well). Humans can cope with most of the errors and find the cited works (often with a little...

Will bloggers pay for promotion and other services to elevate their profiles? That's among the details in The devil you don...

Today's accessibility chatcast featuring George Kersher is now available as a large WMA file from the Opal-Online archive. Just click here.I was delighted to hear him talk about a maximum amount of mainstreaming of content from books and other media. Exactly! The blind and others with special needs should be able to download the latest e-books and other goodies without waits. I also like the idea of the DAISY standards he's been pushing over the years. Imagine the same book available as text, as synthesized speech, as a dramatic performance from a human reader, as braille--as, you name it!...